Anyone with any heart reading those portraits of foreign-born students, I believe, will likely conclude that it isn't easy being an immigrant. The authors categorize the participants in their study as "declining achievers," "low achievers," "improvers," or "high achievers." Even the profiles of high achievers have an underlying sense of loss as some students become distant from their parents in pursuing their American dream. For example, the researchers write about Li, a high achiever from China: “For Li, his enviable academic success comes at a cost: Li’s father no longer recognizes this successful young man. Li has become a stranger—an immigrant—in his own family.”

The book is based on a study of immigrant students in the Boston and San Francisco areas conducted by researchers Carola and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, joined by Irina Todorova, who worked on the project as a postdoctoral scholar. The study began as part of Harvard Immigration Projects at Harvard University, which, in 2004, became Immigration Studies at New York University.

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This area posses the inevitable conundrum. By learning the indigenous language the immigrant student demonstrates a commitment to the host country's culture customs as well as benefiting more readily from an educational process geared to English.

Younger students also benefit substantially from interactive support at home. Parents who do not readily understand or commit to learning English miss the opportunity from the mutual learning curve where parents could develop their own knowledge of English from their children